Never change
by RobertSaysThis
Summary: John always felt like he didn't belong in the world, but now the world has changed: his town has regenerated into a different town, and everyone remembers a stronger and better him. (This is the eighth in a series of stories about a different Thirteenth Doctor, who has the same face but who lives in a darker world.)
1. Chapter 1

The problem never changed, and the problem was that nothing ever changed. The town had done nothing since before John's father was born; just sat there in its tiny valley and seethed. So by the time John came along it was already very angry, and the anger seemed like it had grown along with his clothes. It was there at his first school and even worse at his second, a thing that was never spoken of as he erupted in spots and hair.

People would say that young people had always been angry, but no matter his age John had always seemed calm. He'd held it together when his dad had left and the time that he'd briefly come back, both times cradling his mum as she lay on the floor only sobbing. But now something was breaking over everyone in North East Wales, and for the first time in his life he was really very angry indeed.

"IT'S BECAUSE YOU DON'T LISTEN!" he was shouting down the corridor at his mother. "You're just always thinking about what you need, and never about anyone else!"

"And you're one to talk!" his mother shouted back. "Always _uni_ this and _uni_ that, with never a thought as to what I'll do if you're in _Cardiff_ or _Aberystwyth_ or"– her voice sank with horror –"or _somewhere that's outside of Wales!_ That's your problem, that is! You always just think of yourself!"

Both of them were so angry that nothing around them seemed real, all of their attention focused on the stupidity of the other person. And so neither of them noticed the stains on the carpet and walls, and how both were now softly beginning to glow.

"I don't need to listen to this!" shouted John, grabbing his phone from his pocket. "I'll call Dad; tell him what you're saying! See what he has to say about my _future_ "—

"And I've got something to say about that!" shouted his mother, snatching his phone away. "What're you going to do now, then?" she yelled. "Shout for your father, as loud as you're shouting at me?"

"I don't need technology!" shouted John. "I've got a load of coins!" Their thin house was at the corner of a road, and just opposite was a bright red phone box, as shiny and new as nothing in the town ever was. John had never seen anyone use it, and wasn't really sure if anyone had, but at that moment that didn't seem to matter. He slammed open his front door and ran outside towards it, not noticing how everything was now blazing orange in the sky.

"You're not getting off that easily!" his mum shouted from inside the house. "I'll come in there if I have to; cut the phone off the bloody receiver! There's not a jury in the land who'd convict me!"

"LET ME GO!" shouted John as he ran to the box. "You've been like this since I was a child, and you'll be like it 'till you _die!_ Because you never change, do you? Whatever happens, you NEVER BLOODY"—

A blast of orange flew from behind John and hit his mother square in the chest. Her expression flickered, as if she was too angry to be stunned, and suddenly light was exploding off of her body and clothes.

"Mum?" said John, anger instantly forgotten, then _"Mum!"_ as he processed the fact that she'd just exploded. He looked in horror at his mother's face, which was melting into the shape of another person's entirely…

...before his house exploded into orange light, too, his street and the trees and the clouds. He looked round in horror as the entire world fizzed and glowed, everything except the phone box in front of him and the battered blue shack just beside…

It was an absurd thing to do, but absurdity was all he had left to him. Screaming, he threw himself into the phone box—

—and fell down onto a metal floor, which was far too large and not a bit orange at all. The mania of the last few minutes was replaced by an overwhelming silence, and he lay there for a while as the adrenaline ebbed away.

Eventually, he looked up at where he was. At first, he thought he must be dead, but then Hell wouldn't have so many wires. It wouldn't have a corrugated metal floor, and white concrete walls in place of devils. And it certainly wouldn't have a woman in the centre of the wires, blonde and strange and looking very uncomfortable indeed.

"So," said the woman in the end, "so this is going to be hard to explain."

"Where am I?" said John. "And who are you?"

"This probably isn't what you want to hear right now," she said, "but I'm a qualified psychiatrist."


	2. Chapter 2

Sam was thinking uncharitable thoughts about women, because he didn't know that five minutes earlier he had been one. His date had scheduled their meeting in a place that was totally absurd— the middle of a light-free alley, covered with rubbish that did an impression of being old. For the third time he worried he'd been set up for a mugging, which was a lot less unsettling than the truth.

He couldn't have known that this address had been one of the poshest places in town; that his date had chosen it as a great place to meet a woman for the first time. He couldn't have known because the part of his brain that did know had dissolved and transformed, to be replaced by a completely different bit of brain that knew something else entirely. If someone had told him all his memories had been falsely manufactured he'd have shouted at them and run away, because it would have been a bad thing to say to someone in a darkened alley. But it was still true, in its stubborn and unknowable way.

Something else that had recently been a woman was coming up the alley, and Sam felt his shoulders go cold with adrenaline. He stared at the figure, trying not to feel terrified, then abandoned that plan completely as he stared at the figure some more. It was shaped like a human, more or less. But it looked very like… somehow it _was_ —

"You're a hairdryer," said Sam, feeling stupid.

"I don't understand," said the hairdryer, though a hairdryer wasn't quite what it was. It had a beige and plasticky body under its normal clothes, with strange shapes where a human's hands and feet might be. It was only its head that resembled an appliance: long and curved like an upturned vase, with a grating at the end covering fierce propellor-like blades. Its voice was bellowing from its eyes like speakers, and it had no idea it had once been as human as Sam.

" _You_ don't understand?" said Sam weakly.

"I don't understand," it said again. It was coming closer to Sam now, walking over the rotting rubbish, and as it did so the grating over its blades slipped clean away.

"There's no need for violence," said Sam, as the creature came closer and closer. "I take very good care of my hair!"

"I don't understand," came the voice from the speaker eyes. "I don't understand." The blades began to spin into a high whine, drowning out the hairdryer's repeating phrase.

Sam turned and tried to run, but fell over a huge pile of rubbish-stuffed black plastic bags. He stared up in horror at the advancing _thing_ —

"Don't kill me," he said. "Please."

"I don't understand," said the thing, its blades still spinning away.

"I don't want to hurt you! I've got nothing against… whatever it is you are! I'm supposed to be on a date," he begged, "with a _woman._ "

"I don't understand," said speakers that weren't quite as close as the blades.

 _"NO!"_ screamed Sam to a completely expressionless face.

Moving and unmoved, the blades continued to spin.


	3. Chapter 3

It should have got easier, after a while. It should have seemed _real_ that his mother and street had exploded, even though it was the least real thing he could imagine. His mind began to try and construct another explanation of how his situation could make sense, then once again felt it snap apart under the strain.

He looked over at the woman, who was soldering a toothbrush to a wall.

"Am I," he said, "in a"—

"You're not in a dream," said the woman. Stop asking that." She looked up at him. "I'm the Doctor, by the way."

"John Smith," said the man, holding out his hand from far away.

The Doctor stared at him in shocked delight. "Get on!" she said.

"It's a very common name!"

"Not in my experience." She paused, frowning. "Are you, you know…" she pointed at him, then at her, and mimed herself exploding with her hands.

"Are you hitting on me?" said John uncertainly.

"You're not. You're just _actually_ called that!" She grinned at him. "But this never happens!"

John looked at her uncomfortably.

"I don't know what part of the world you're from," he said at last. "But my name is— lots of black people have names like"—

The Doctor's face fell as she realised.

"That," she said, "is exactly what someone would think was happening in this situation."

She slumped her shoulders, and sighed.

"So I'm an alien from a planet at the end of time, and my real name's a big secret I certainly won't tell to just anyone who walks into a phone box. So I call myself 'The Doctor,' but when people want me to have a more _namey_ name I call myself 'John Smith.' But I don't know what to do if I meet someone who's _actually_ called John Smith! So, you see, it's that," she said, "not casual racism."

"But you're a woman," he said.

"What?"

"You're a woman, and you call yourself _John Smith_ —"

"It's short for Johnnifer. And that's the bit that surprised you, about everything I just said?"

"Well," he shrugged. "It does make sense. You're here in this concrete thing that's much too large for a phone box, and everything outside was all orange." He shrugged. "Aliens are as good an explanation as anything."

"All orange?" asked the Doctor, suddenly very serious.

"Yeah. I was outside and… and my mother exploded," he said very quickly, "and everything around her was exploding into orange. But that's just your glow, right?" he said desperately. "Your mysterious, alien glow?"

"No," said the Doctor softly. "No, and I've let you down. And I'm sorry."

John felt tears surging under his cheeks. "Then my mother's _dead_ "—

"No," said the Doctor, "she isn't."

John looked up through the tears.

"But," she continued, "you'll never see her again. It's… it's complicated, I'm afraid. And overwhelming."

"I can take complicated," said John. "Maybe not the second bit."

"No," said the Doctor, "but there's a lot of that bit around, these days."


	4. Chapter 4

"It's too much, Doctor," Lorna was saying in space and time nearby, "all of it is. It's amazing, but it's so exhausting as well, and I just don't think I can do it anymore. Don't get me wrong," she said, "it was nice, while it was a holiday. But if things like the Daleks can be anywhere now… I think I'd rather stay home for a while."

"I understand," said the Doctor, smiling.

"But Christina still wants to travel with you."

The Doctor's smile became fixed.

"Chris? But I've lots to take care of. Living bombs, and a robot Vladimir Putin. It's not a safe life, for someone as young as her. Not if she doesn't have you."

"Maybe not. But I trust you to keep her safe."

"You _trust_ me?" said the Doctor, astonished. "With your _child?_ "

"Of course I do. You were willing to die for her on Edinburgh Four, and for me. That's more than I usually ask in a childminder."

The Doctor sighed. "It's just not something that would happen before I was"— she waved her hands up and down her body —"you know."

"But that's a good thing, isn't it? That now someone would trust you in that way?"

"Not at all. It means I dotted off this way and that 'cause nobody thought to give me responsibilities, and I never even noticed because all the time no one ever said."

"Well, that's the thing about being a woman," said Lorna. "Makes you understand what it means to be a man."

She closed the door behind her as she left the room, and the Doctor saw in the mirror how exhausted she'd started to look by now.

"This is a lot less empowering than I thought it would be," she muttered to her tired reflection.


	5. Chapter 5

"Imagine," said the Doctor somewhere else, "a bomb."

"I can do that," said John.

"Well, you're doing it wrong. You see them on the news, sometimes, don't you? Ones which were lying around unexploded since the war, which the army have to come to defuse." She smiled. "I'm sort of the army."

"You don't look like it."

"Well, I didn't succeed. But this bomb was from a different kind of war. It's one that… _creates_ , instead of destroys. That changes what everything is. Including people, including whole towns. It was something my people tried, when things had become very bad. The wrong kind of weapon, that's come to a very wrong place."

"My town's been hit by a _bomb!?_ " John cried. "But you said that my mum's still alive! Even though she just exploded."

"She is still alive. She's just a bit different now." She frowned. "Did I tell you how I have a time machine?"

John looked stunned, briefly astonished in a good way. "That's _amazing!_ " he started to say. "It's"—

"Let's not dwell on it; I'm making a point. Which is that I could take an old man, right, and put the baby he once was in his arms. And he might not know how to hold himself and it'd all be very awkward, but they'd still be the same person, wouldn't they? On the inside?"

"Not really," said John, thinking of something he'd read. "The atoms in their bodies would all have changed"—

"And that's exactly my point!" said the Doctor. "A bit. All the parts of them changed, and it's still the same… it's the same"—

She frowned to herself.

"It's hard," she said. "Because your language is terrible. You don't have a word for the thing you know most in the world. You're feeling things now, John things, experiencing stuff that's not what anyone else. And someone could go through your brain and look at all its memories, but they'd still never find that _you_. It's in there, all made by your brain, it's not like a gas or a soul. But if your brain… became a completely _different_ brain… then that youness wouldn't really change. Even if everything else did; though everything around it had."

"What are you trying to say?" said John.

"I'm saying your mother's changed. Changed a _lot._ She's got a whole new body, and a whole new mind. But she is still your mother, John. She is still _her_."

The anger that was still inside John thrust up through him again. "How can you know that?" he said. "How can you know that she's not just gone?"

"Because it's something my people know a lot about," said the Doctor, "'cause regeneration's a thing we keep on doing. We keep our memories, but it wouldn't matter if we didn't; I've forgotten who I was so many times by now. But it's always the same you looking out your eyes, whatever eyes they end up being. Though I can't prove any of that, of course. You'll have to take it on faith, I'm afraid."

John sighed. He thought about how the last thing he'd said to his mother was something both furious and loud, how she'd never remember it and how he always would. It was easy for the Doctor say that what happened had not been a death. But he felt very deeply in himself that someone he loved had now gone.

"It's a lot to take in," he said.

"Yes," said the Doctor. "It always is. It's very hard when a person becomes another one, even for people like me."

"Your people have your memories, though," said John. "You can all talk about whoever you used to be."

"We can," said the Doctor. "Although."

"What?"

She have a sad smile. "It's not something you'd want to hear right now, either."

"Try me."

"It's just these days there's a lot it'd be pretty nice to forget."


	6. Chapter 6

"Here we are," said the Doctor as she flung open the TARDIS doors, "The tooth planet of Dentaplax One!"

Chris looked out at the partially decorated restaurant which she'd already known would be there. It was the ancient one not that far from their house, which served terrible food and had decor that was older than her gran. It never seemed like it had any customers, and there was only one person sitting at any of the tables at all.

"Surprise!" said her mother from under a giant party hat. "You're not surprised," she added as she saw her daughter's expression.

"It knew it was all made up," said Chris. "There's no such thing as a tooth planet."

"Is too," said the Doctor. "It's a wonder of time and space. And I was going to take you there, but your mother said this place would be better."

"I felt bad about your eleventh birthday," said her mum. "How we were going on an adventure but then everything got destroyed. So I thought, we have a time machine, right? We can go back to the day when it actually was! So you can have a proper birthday party, as it's your birthday all over again now."

"But it's not," said Chris. "That's not how a birthday works. I'm already more than eleven years old, because of how much I've aged. It doesn't matter what day it is right now.

"I told her you were going to say that," said the Doctor.

l

"She did," said Chris's mother. "I hoped I knew you better."

She sighed very heavily indeed.

"I know you've not really just turned eleven," said Chris's mother. "But we've had a hard time lately, haven't we? I expect even the Doctor's not seen that many cities burn down, and one's been too many for me. And now that we're all together, I thought it'd be nice. That it'd be good, to have something that was nice."

Chris looked up at the balloons, which were the exact colour that she liked. Months ago she'd mentioned that they were her favourite, and she hadn't thought that her mother would ever remember.

"It is nice," she said, smiling. "I'm still eleven, and also eleven days. I'd like to have a party about that."

Her mother beamed at her, and went to light the candles.

A shrill and tinny beeping went off in the Doctor's pocket.

"Oh Hell," said the Doctor, "I really have to get that."

"But it's my birthday," said Chris, not even angrily.

"It's my pager," said the Doctor, "and I'm on call right now."

"You do know," said Lorna with a sigh, "that you're not actually a real doctor—"

"A psychiatrist is absolutely a real doctor!"

"You know that's not what I meant," said Lorna, but the Doctor wasn't listening. She was frowning over a massive book that hadn't obviously come from anywhere, with the words _DUTY LOG_ written on it in an ominous font.

"Time Lords have a rota system," said the Doctor, "and everyone's on it by law. Every so often, once in a few thousand years"— she scowled —"we all have to go _on duty_."

"Oh," said Lorna. "Could you not just go on duty here?"

"Only if something really awful was happening! Like that cake had a black hole in it, which it doesn't, because I checked. On duty's when we clean up all the messes our species ever made. And that's a lot," she winced, "even by human standards."

"You're making a pretty big mess of things right now," said Lorna.

"Well, this'll be worse," said the Doctor, frowning at her book. "Handwriting's terrible," she said. "Either I have to fight Robespierre, or I have to fight the Robosphere. Either way, it sounds pretty urgent."

"Oh, _go_ , then," spat Lorna, "it's not like it can wait. Even though it's Christina's birthday, and you literally have a time machine."

The Doctor looked incredibly uncomfortable, and shut her book to look up at her friends.

"I don't want to miss Chris's birthday," she said, "I really don't! But not going now, that's not how any of this works"—

"And leaving's not how we work, either," said Lorna. "We've had enough of that going on in this family. Do you have any idea how _important_ this is?"

The Doctor looked trapped. "I really need to go," she said as she played with her hands.

"Fine," said Lorna. "Maybe it's for the best. Heard they cut a lot of heads off, back in the French Revolution. Makes you wonder where all of them were coming from."

The Doctor looked at her to check if she was joking, then hastily reached for the TARDIS when she couldn't tell. In a moment the restaurant was filled with the sounds of her ship slipping away, and Chris wondered if her mother had paid the waiters enough not to make a big fuss.

She hadn't said anything throughout the whole angry conversation. She was too young to be able to talk about what she was feeling, to put it to words and make it all true in her mind. But she still felt it: that sense of being defended in a way she didn't want to be, to protect a version of herself that wasn't really there. The feeling that she was the mother and her mum was the child, which might have destroyed them both in a world where there weren't bigger threats. But now the Doctor had gone Chris saw how crushed her mum looked, and for a second those feelings didn't seem like they mattered at all.

"The cake is nice," she said. "And the balloons."

"Thanks, love," said her mum. "I wanted you to have a lovely time."

"I am," said Chris.

"I know," her mum replied.

They held each other close as her mother began to cry.


	7. Chapter 7

John's street hadn't been that remarkable in the past, and no one had yet remarked on it in its new incarnation. But people would soon start saying what they thought people always had: how posh the area was, how large its houses and how many trees in its gardens. The people who lived on that street would think about how well they'd done to end up in a place that was like it, and only one of them would have any idea of the truth.

On the corner of the road was a blue and ruined box, completely out of keeping with the tone of the street it now sat in. Beside it, two people stepped out of a phone box that wasn't big enough for them both. John stared in horror at the world he had just emerged to, unable to believe it was the one that he'd left behind.

"This isn't right," he said. "It isn't where I live. The phone box that's a bomb; it must have moved"—

"It hasn't," said the Doctor, shaking her head. "Look at the street signs. It's the same name; it's the same place. It just now looks a little bit different.

"Then," said John, looking towards the ridiculously large building in front of him, "then that's"—

"That's your house," said the Doctor, smiling. "Your mother's gone up in the world."

John gaped. "But that's impossible! It's insane!"

"Oh, it's both those things. But it's happened, all the same."

Her new friend stared up at the new house, trying to take it all in.

"It's very _big,_ " he said in the end. "But the curtains are all a bit tacky."

"Well, that's the problem with regeneration," said the Doctor. "You never know what you're going to get." She hesitated. "John," she said. "We've not talked about what you're going to do, now you don't have anywhere to live. It's not strictly _your_ house any more"—

"That's not a problem," he said. "Dad lives out of town; he'll be the same as ever."

The Doctor made a face as she disagreed. "Normally? You'd be completely right. But this bomb's at the nastier end of the atrocities committed by my people. It regenerates the memory of a place, not just the substance of it: when your Dad thinks of this town he'll think of it as it is now. As if it was always this way; like it had never changed. And that means"—

She hesitated, and shuffled her feet on the grass.

"What?" said John, unable to keep the anxiety from his voice.

"It isn't fair," she said. "You've already lost one of your parents today."

"What does that _mean?_ " said John, getting angry for the second time in the day and in his life. "How can I have lost him as well?"

She looked at him with bad news in her eyes, in the way that a doctor would have to know how to do.

"I don't know for sure," she said. "But I think the John he'll remember is another you. The one you would've become if you'd regenerated as well, like you"—

"Like I should've?" snapped John. "Is that what you're going to say? That it's not enough to have lost my parents, lost my _life_ ; that I should've gone and exploded myself as well?"

" _No_ ," said the Doctor. "That's not what I wanted to say"—

"I only have your word for any of this!" he shouted. "You couldn't even defuse the stupid bomb! I bet Dad'll remember me just fine, and Mum too! She looks a bit different, maybe, but I'm still her _son!_ I've been there so often for her; for things that she won't forget. She'll see that it's me, right? She'll recognise her own flesh and blood?"

The Doctor tried to arrange her face to spell "No" in a gentle way, then gave up and looked despondent instead.

"It's different flesh now," she said heavily. "It's not the same blood."

"You don't know what we've been through," said John, "you don't know how we are!" He ran towards to the front door that was still a little open, ready to enter the house that had once been his own. The Doctor thought about shouting for him to stop then just ran after him instead, trying to think of any way to stop the disaster about to unfold.

In the window and unseen by them both, a thing with the head of a hairdryer loomed. It stood tall thinking thoughts that couldn't even be described, feeling things that would make language begin to break down and scream.

Behind the lattice grille that marked its mouth, three sharp and metal blades began to spin.


	8. Chapter 8

Regeneration knew all about how to tell lies of the past. It gave people laughter lines from jokes they hadn't heard; put scar tissue through the cracks of never-broken bones. And it had done something similar to the house the Johns ran through now. There were photos of a John who had never been, as the baby and child and young man that he never was. There were worn games he'd never played and old socks that he'd never worn; dirty clothes that had never been dirtied sitting dry in the washing machine. All of it was enough to give a sense of the man that he would have become. And all of it made it clear how that man would be nothing like him.

It was clear to the Doctor as well as John ran into a room on the right, and she wasn't really sure what she should do. She could smash in after him and apologise for how he'd broken into his mother's house, but she wasn't sure how she'd explain why she'd gone and broken in too. She'd run into that place without thinking anything through, and somehow that wasn't working in the way it had seemed to before.

Her thoughts were broken by a thin, high sound she'd hoped never to hear on the Earth. She'd known the bomb that had landed here was bad, but she'd had limits to how far she'd thought that _bad_ might go. Regeneration bomb, yes, memory overwriting, possibly. But even in the darkest days bombs that overwrote your species were shunned. One winding its way down here meant her people once sank further than she'd imagined, and she shuddered once again at what it meant that she was one of them.

The whine was coming from a room up on her left, on the other side of the house to where John and his mother's voices were now raised. Swinging open the door, the Doctor saw what she hoped she wouldn't: a thing with the head of a hairdryer, still dressed in a woman's clothes.

"I don't understand," it said. "I don't understand."

"You wouldn't," said the Doctor, "and I'm not sure I really do either. We bought the Bendolene to Earth, then. And I've the nerve to call other species monsters."

"I don't understand," repeated the Bendolene, as it began moving towards her. "I don't understand." The grille in front of its mouth clanged open, revealing its spinning blades.

"I don't want to hurt you, you know," said the Doctor. "I don't even want to fight you. And I know I'm just speaking to myself, when I'm saying all this."

She bought out her sonic screwdriver and pointed it up to the roof.

"Can't interrupt that argument John and his mum're having," she said. "A fight'd make them both run through, see everything that's broken in. Maybe it's for the best if I can't hear myself think."

The light on her screwdriver glowed, but no sound came from it at all; the waves coming out of the device exactly cancelling out the ones it gave out just from functioning. The silence expanded as the screwdriver blocked out every noise, and the Doctor bounded to a wall where a light like a cactus stood.

"...!" she cried triumphantly, hauling the light up with one arm without bothering to unplug it from the wall. It was big and long and narrow enough for a weapon, and she imagined the crunching sound it should have made as the glass hit the Bendolene's blades. Sparks flew from its mouth as the cactus light made its way into it, and wishing she didn't have to the Doctor thumped her fist on its head. Dazed, the creature reeled to one side, then keeled over as it fell soundlessly to the floor.

The Doctor looked at the long electric cable still attached to the stump of the light, and wound it tightly round the Bendolene until it was firmly held prisoner. Tentatively, she reached over to her screwdriver and turned off the waves cancelling out the sound.

Screams of rage and fury bellowed into the room from nearby, and the Bendolene started to say the same thing over and over again.

The Doctor sighed quietly to herself, and turned on the silence again.


	9. Chapter 9

There wasn't a trace of anger in Elaine Smith from the argument she'd had with her son. It had burned away with her former body about twenty minutes ago, along with every memory she'd had of what had caused it. But there was fury in her new body anyway, new adrenaline boiling through it in a rage. A stranger had smashed into where she was peacefully sitting, and this Elaine responded in a way that was just like the last.

"What in hell are you doing?" she shouted at the stranger. "Breaking into my house in broad daylight and at the weekend? The police take our security very seriously, you should know, and if you don't get out of here _right now_ "—

"It's not like that!" the stranger cried. "I'm just here to see the new you. I know this sounds weird – _more_ than weird, totally mental – but I'm John, I'm your son"—

Elaine snorted. "That's a new one! It's one thing barging in claiming to be some long-lost relative; here you are saying you're one I already know! I don't know who you are; but you're nothing like my son! You're shorter and fatter, and frankly you're much uglier than him. And you can't be half as bright as he is if you've come up with a plan as bad as this."

The stranger looked at her pleadingly. "What if I said something only John would know?" he said. "Something that was only about us, like that time with the swans? When one chased me round the lake, and you were talking about how the Queen didn't let us kill any of them, but if one killed me then you'd bet you couldn't sue her!'"

He laughed weakly, then stopped when he saw her expression.

"Remember?" he said desperately. "The swans?"

She wasn't angry anymore. She was just sad, and slightly scared.

"I don't know who you think I am," she said softly. "But I've no idea what you're talking about. I'm sorry if you've lost your mother, I really am. But I'm not her. And you're not my son."

He looked right into her eyes, which were not the right ones anymore.

"Mum," he said softly. "Please."

"You're clearly in distress," she said. "But this is still my house. And if you don't leave now, I _will_ have to phone the police"—

"No," said the stranger in a strangled way. "You won't have to do that. I'm sorry for wasting your time, Ms Smith."

He ran out of the room, but not before she heard him sob.

She heard a door slamming, but she made sure to check through the window anyway. The stranger had left, right enough, but he was still there just outside. She watched for a while in case he'd break in again, and after a while she saw a completely different stranger come to hug him tightly in her arms. Through the glass she heard him say that other stranger was a doctor, and she hoped they were qualified to make sure he wouldn't escape again.

You never knew what went through the minds of the mentally ill. But a part of her worried that stranger had been obsessed with her family for some time. How did he know her name, after all? How could he have known _John's?_

She shivered, and hoped her son out there was safe.


	10. Chapter 10

At the exact point in time that nobody would notice, the box by the street disappeared and appeared once again. The Doctor looked exhausted as she clambered out of it— she'd got out of the habit of using time travel quite so intricately.

She'd been reluctant to drag the stunned Bendolene through the corridors of someone's house, and leaving it there with its flesh-slicing blades didn't seem like a great idea either. So there was only one thing for it: to turn off the sound in the room she was in, run out the house through the back, vworp back to the room and pick up the Bendolene, then vworp out again to before John would be done with his fight. It was the sort of temporal gymnastics that could probably win her medals, and it made her scowl that no one had seen her do it.

As she walked towards the house John burst out the door in tears, and quick as she could she buried her scowl away.

"I'm sorry," she said as she took him into his arms. She could tell he was uncomfortable with crying so openly as a man, and she wished she could say how she'd once been just like that, too. But it wasn't the time for saying anything at all, so she just hugged him tight as she could.

"She's the _same_ ," he said through the tears. "With a different face and voice, but I knew it was still her. Why couldn't she have known _me_ , Doctor? Why did all that have to change?"

"It's not always the same," she said. "The John you'd have become; he could've been very different to the person that you are now. Regeneration's funny like that. There can be things a person finds hard to let go, and people who can let go of everything. There's no rhyme or reason to it, not really. It can take a while, before some people change."

She sighed, and looked towards the TARDIS.

"And _sometimes_?" she continued. "Sometimes a person can change a lot. Look, you've had a very stressful day. And everything I have to do now, it'll be more stressful than that. Before we go any further, I have to ask— do you _want_ to go further, with any of this? 'Cause there's no shame at all in running away."

John gave the snotty snort of someone who'd run out of tears. He looked at her in a blank way like he hadn't heard her question, then looked empty as he told himself the answer.

"All this change, everything that's happened. It's too soon for it to be real. With what I think real's going to feel like, I'd like to keep going with you. Because all of this, it all just feels like a dream."

"Now that," said the Doctor as she fiddled with the TARDIS doors, "that's an extremely convenient answer. Seeing as what's about to happen, it probably won't seem real to you at all."

She looked away from his face as she thrust open her blue box, so she didn't have to watch his response to seeing the inside of the TARDIS, or the strange half-plastic person that fell weightily out to her arms.

"Okay, that's _too_ unreal," said John, weakly. "My dreams are a bit odd, but not"—

"The unreal's just getting started. So that's your neighbour Rosie, except she's a hairdryer now," said the Doctor. "And I've been keeping her in this box, except it's actually my time machine and it has a whole forest inside. So if you're wondering about all those things you just saw, well. That's pretty much what all of it was."

"I don't understand," said the hairdryer, reflecting the mood.

John took a very deep breath, feeling like he wanted to give the universe a shake. He tried to remember what he'd read in his science books: that whenever someone learned something massive and about the world, it seemed impossible, like everything they'd thought was true was warped into something new. But the books would also say that however frightening that new truth was, it was rarely the whole of the story. Newton changed the way the whole world moved, but Einstein would come to tell him to think again. No matter how weird things got, things could always get weirder below.

But then Einstein's neighbour had never turned into a household appliance.

"Rosie's not a hairdryer," he said. "She's a woman! I don't even know if she had a hairdryer."

"She _was_ a woman. Now she's that. When regeneration's made into a weapon; that's when you get things like the Bendolene. A whole different kind of life, based on other life changing to them."

"But she's still _her?_ "

"As much as your mother's still your mother. Same person inside, even if she's now got the mind of a hairdryer."

"I don't understand," said the Bendolene that had once been called Rosie.

"It does get a little bit complicated," said the Doctor.

"It's speaking English!" said John. "Has it's language not gone and regenerated?"

"Oh no, that's me. The power of my wonderful spaceship; translates any language into your own."

"I don't understand," the hairdryer said again.

"Except," said the Doctor. "It isn't working here. This is a very bad example, for your first time at all this."

"I don't understand," said John.

"Don't you start saying it, too! We were struggling there, right, when we talked about _youness?_ It's a concept we both understand, but our words just slide round it like they're made of grease. You can't translate something into English if there's _no way to say it in English_ , because—"

"I don't understand," said the Bendolene.

"Everything the Bendolene think is alien," said the Doctor. " _Really_ alien. There's no way you can understand it, and there's no way it can understand you. In fact, the only thing either of you _can_ understand about each other is—"

"That we don't understand," said John.

"Aren't we the distinguished philosophers," said the Doctor.

"This is insane," said John.

"It's one of the less normal days, I'll grant you that."

"It's mad! I always thought I knew what aliens would be like; all tentacles and little green men! But you're just an ordinary woman, and she's just lying there like a _hairdryer_ "—

"That's the thing about aliens," said the Doctor. "Wouldn't be doing our job right if we didn't seem a bit, well. _Alien_."

" _I don't understand,_ " said the Bendolene.

"Bit slow," said the Doctor. "Unlike me. Your body's not saying what your words are John; it's all there in your face. You know I'm an alien, and it doesn't bother you; in fact it's the total reverse. You're _relieved_ , aren't you? To meet someone who isn't really human."

John looked incredibly awkward.

"You look incredibly awkward," said the Doctor. "Maybe I should phrase this as a question. Rosie the Bendolene, a hairdryer bound up in wire. Everything you say she finds totally incomprehensible, and you'd never even consider that she could understand how you feel. And I'm thinking you wouldn't feel any different," she said, "if she was still a human person there right now."

She turned sadly to him, though his eyes were looking away.

"I'm right, aren't I?" she said. "Everyone's like a Bendolene to you."

John sighed.

"You're right," he said. "People don't always think I'm very… peopley."

"I do!" said the Doctor in mock outrage.

"I know. But it's like you said; you're an alien. You're not like what other people are."

"In my experience," said the Doctor, "other people are like a great many things indeed."

"You know what I mean, though. Like… like you have to keep secrets, all of the time, because if you're honest about what you're keeping in everyone'll just _stare_?

"Yes," said the Doctor, "is something I definitely understand. But the kind of person I am," she said, "has a great many secrets indeed."


	11. Chapter 11

"She's started sleeping properly since you've been around," Lorna said as the Doctor shut Chris's bedroom door. "Even with everything that's going on." She smiled. "I don't know how you do it."

"I'm good at bedtime stories," said the Doctor, "even when you're as old as eleven. Chris is very into Norse gods at the minute. Thought I'd tell her what they were _really_ like."

Lorna scoffed. "Not real, you mean?"

The Doctor laughed. "That'd be a mercy! I always said Thor might as well've been the god of toxic masculinity, all getting drunk and telling us he was strong. Had to beat him in a thumb war to shut him up, in case he went off and started a real one. And everybody always thought that I was his _brother_ "—

She stopped talking, and frowned.

"You aren't listening to any of this, are you?" she said.

Lorna smiled. "You do go on sometimes. I just meant I'm glad she has someone, really. It's good, seeing her happy again. Sometimes when I think about how things could've been, I forget that there wouldn't be her. And I'm glad that she's here; I really am. You can't wish the people you love away. It's just the way things are sometimes, it does seem a bit like"—

She hesitated very slightly, and then continued.

"Do you ever feel like this isn't the real world?" she said.

The Doctor looked at her in a very odd way indeed.

"Of course not," she said abruptly. "That's ridiculous. Why would you think that; what gave you that idea?"

"You know!" said Lorna. "It's just, when I was younger, thinking about what I might become. I didn't think it'd be this. I was smart, you know, I could've got the grades." She smiled. "Maybe there's a world where I'm a psychiatrist, too."

"And maybe there's a whole lot of them where I'm not," said the Doctor coldly.

"Don't be like that! It's not meant to offend you. It's different for you anyway, isn't it? You've got to be all sorts of people. You've probably done everything you've wanted by now, right? And been everyone who you've ever wanted to be."

"Perhaps," said the Doctor, something rising in her throat. "And perhaps it's not so different for me at all."

" _The Fell Siren is ringing_ ," a voice was screaming in her head. " _The Fell Siren is ringing_." The voice was deafening and the siren below it was loud, and she was hearing herself talking to Lorna as if she was someone else entirely— as if she'd regenerated and her mind was still stuck inside the body. She now realised she'd known for ages, that the rise of the Daleks was coming. The siren that heralded it had been ringing for a long time, well before the TARDIS had thought to tell her it was there. All that had changed was that she no longer had any energy to block out the having to hear it.

 _"None of you are strong enough for this,"_ her inner voice was shouting. _"None of your faces in none of the worlds. You're the strongest creation in all of the places you're found. But you_ know _that no Doctor can withstand the thing that is coming."_

A tiny part of her noticed how Lorna was looking at her, and she shook herself as close to reality as possible.

"What's wrong?" Lorna was saying softly. "You can tell me, Doctor, you really can. I don't care if it's about the Vikings or whatever. You know I'll still listen to you, right?"

The Doctor looked at her like a baby mouse trapped in a fire, then put on what she imagined might be a grin.

"Nothing's wrong," she said. "Honestly. I'm an alien, remember? Two hearts, curious hormones. I just seem a bit odd now and then; it's part of the functioning."

"Of course," said Lorna. "We'll say no more about it. But get some sleep, okay? You look shattered, and I'll bet you really are."

The Doctor smiled more honestly at that.. It meant a lot to her to know she was still good at lying, even as she lost track of whatever was true in the world. It meant she still had the strength that she'd had back then, before the siren had sounded and everything had changed. It meant there was some hope to cling to, even here.

And she was so exhausted she didn't remember how Lorna would've known it too, how much it meant that the Doctor was able to deceive her. And she didn't even notice what usually she'd see straight away— that perhaps other people could be brilliant at lying, too.


	12. Chapter 12

"It's not a problem, is it, though?" said John. "Having hairdryer people around."

"It's a problem," said the Doctor as she fumbled through her pockets for a thing. "I'm not sure they'll be here for much longer."

She fumbled through ancient sweet wrappers as she fished out what she was looking for: a small blue sphere a bit like a rubber ball. As she held it the hologram of a spaceship flickered in its middle, all angular shapes stuck in a confusing way.

"So they have a spaceship?" said John. "That doesn't seem like an issue."

"It's to scale," said the Doctor flatly.

"But there's nothing beside it!"

"That's the issue. If you had stupidly amazing eyesight, you'd see a little dot about an eighth of a millimetre across. Which is the Earth, if the Earth would survive something that size appearing on it. It wouldn't, of course; we're a fly on a window screen."

She mimed an insect splatting on glass, inappropriately. John's mind tried to reel from the news his whole planet was in danger, then found it had reeled too much already. He just took it calmly, like a nurse hearing news of a death.

"I'd ask why they need it to be that large," he said with a sigh, "but I'm guessing that we wouldn't understand."

"Smart!" said the Doctor with a smile. "Sensible words from a sensible name."

"But what I _also_ don't understand," he went on, "is how the ship gets here in the first place."

"Ah! Now that I can help with, a bit. They construct it in an incomprehensible way, sort of twist it out of an object that's lying around. Folding something through space until it's something _bigger_ , but it has to be the right sort of something to work at all. Don't ask why."

"I wasn't going to!" said John.

"Also smart! Everyone should be called John Smith; the world'd be better then." The Doctor was buzzing her sonic screwdriver over the Bendolene, watching as the creature tried to break free of the wire. It was straining in a particular direction, down the road that joined the street and towards the centre of the town.

"We'll let Rosie go," she said. "We'll follow the Bendolene; they'll lead us to whatever's turning into their ship. And when we get there," she smiled, "I'll have a trick up my sleeve."

She pulled a long, thin stick out of one cuff of her shirt, wincing slightly as it scraped against her arm.

"Did you put that there just to make the joke?" asked John wearily.

"Ah, questions," said the Doctor happily. "This stick, it's a sort of back-regenerative channel; my species use it when we want to talk to the people our friends once were. If it's fully charged, we can talk to the people the Bendolene _used_ to be; get them to understand that we don't want the world to go splat. It's just," she said awkwardly, "I'll need a little something from you."

"I'm not going to like this; am I?" said John.

"'Fraid not. Charging the stick takes something with a huge regenerative potential— something that _should've_ changed, but didn't. And I'm afraid that means"—

"Me," said John, his heart sinking. "You want me to sacrifice myself, to save the world."

"Not _you_ , you idiot," said the Doctor. "Your clothes! I need you to take them off. Not all of them, of course. Just the vast majority."

" _What?_ " said John, horrified.

"You thought I wanted you to _die!_ " said the Doctor. "How is this more awful than that?"

"Dying to save people would be dignified. _Stripping_ to do it is"—

"Nobody said anything about _stripping_ "—

"I'm not taking off my clothes!"

" _Fine_ ," said the Doctor, throwing her hands in the air. "The planet's destroyed now, everyone, but at least our John's still got his _dignity!_ There's nothing for it, then."

John stared at her. "You're giving up?"

"I'm finding another way. We need clothes; we don't have any time." She looked at him. "You got any money on you?"

He remembered the change for the phone box, which seemed from a lifetime ago. "Some," he said. "Not very much."

"Then it's settled, then!" said the Doctor. "We're going to save the world. And we're going to do it"—

–she paused dramatically–

—"in a charity shop." She grinned to herself. "I do like these low-key adventures." She looked at John. "How do you feel about running?"

"Hate it!" said John. "Always came last in our sports days."

"Well, we don't have a lot of time," said the Doctor as she loosed the Bendolene from its bindings, "So you're about to hate it an awful lot more."

She darted off towards the town at an impossible speed without saying another word.

John let himself be perfectly still for one glorious moment, then sighed and ran as fast as he could as well.


	13. Chapter 13

"I had another friend who worked in a shop," said the Doctor to Lorna over the table. "The last time I was from the North. She'd be"— she laughed. "God. She'd be about your age now."

Lorna looked hurt. "And why is that funny?"

"Oh, it's not. Just odd. Took time and space in her stride, but I don't think she ever thought that one day she'd be in her thirties."

"I can understand that. You're young for so long, then all of a sudden you're just not anymore. It happens so fast, and nobody ever says."

She looked curiously at the Doctor, who was dipping her toast in her tea.

"What happened to her, in the end?" she said. "There's not always a future in retail."

"Oh, she changed careers. She kills Cybermen now, in another universe. You can never predict it, the opportunities that'll come up. But she has a child, now!" she said, suddenly remembering, "so she's like you in that way as well. And I suppose, _in a way_. Having a child's the greatest adventure of all."

Lorna gave a grim smile and held up her phone, as the word _PATRONISING_ danced across the screen.

"I should never have made you that app," said the Doctor.

"Ninth time this week," said Lorna. "I'm using it more than Facebook. Which reminds me," she said as she tapped on her phone, "I saw something on there today. Jill's always posting rubbish no one reads, and this is probably nothing. But I don't know what's real or not, since you came along in our lives."

She tossed her phone over to the Doctor, who made a face.

"That's not nothing", she said. "That's a crisis."

"Oh, Lord. Jill'll never let it go; if she's spotted an alien invasion. Are you sure it's that, though? You hear about things like this a lot, and it's always a silly rumour."

"Oh yes. Snakes in the loo; it's extremely improbable. But the Neversnake becomes less and less improbable, the closer to its source that you get. By the time you're as near to it as this, there's no way it can't exist." She grimaced. "Quantum reptiles. They can be very annoying."

"Is the world about to end?" said Lorna, trying to believe it might.

"Not with this. But the city might. How would you feel about your daughter saving Manchester?"

"That'd be good! We've got to have civic duty."

"Great! Then when she's back from school we can get on with things. We're going," she smiled, "to _hire a plumber_."

"Oh," said Lorna. "That doesn't sound very interesting."

"It can't always be interesting!" said the Doctor. "It's saving the world. You have to roll with the punches, in this sort of profession. Take whatever you can get. Job like this," she said with a sigh, "takes you to places you'd never expect."


	14. Chapter 14

"This was an Oxfam before," said John, dumbly.

"And now it's this!" said the Doctor. "Every regeneration, it comes with its own eccentricities."

They stared up at the sign that read _WALES FOR WHALES_ , with its dragon and sea creature cheerfully entwined.

"It doesn't seem like something anyone would support," said John as they walked through the door.

"Well, they should," said the Doctor guiltily, "even nice people go round killing whales these days."

Despite John's disbelief, the shop was doing well for itself. A number of people were milling around inside, buying odd ornaments that had regenerated from odder ones. It could be hard to find the men's clothes in a shop like this – especially if you were panicking about the end of the world – but the Doctor dragged him over to a rack of checked shirts and worn trousers. They looked terrible, but there wasn't time to worry: he grabbed things of about the right size and dashed to the open cubicle to change.

"We'll pay for those right away," said the Doctor to the man on the till as she slammed down the coins John had given her. "And we won't need a bag."

"Good for you," smiled the man. "Save the planet!"

"I'll try," said the Doctor, her attention already elsewhere. The two cubicles at one end of the shop were good at preserving modesty, with long curtains that almost fell to the floor. But she could see pink stumps that weren't feet poking out of the bottom of one, and knew that the thing inside was no longer a human.

"In a changing room," she said. "Fitting."

She swished open the curtain to reveal a Bendolene, which had completely entangled itself in hooks and clothes. "I don't understand," said its voice from under a green woolen hat.

"Hey," said an awkward man behind the Doctor. "I'm not being rude. But you shouldn't look into a changing room when it's clear that there's someone inside."

"You shouldn't," said the Doctor, gesturing into the cubicle. "But the person in there is a _hairdryer!_ "

"I don't care if it's the Queen of Norway," said the man as he thrust the curtain closed, "it still deserves a little privacy. It could've been _naked_ ," he muttered, "you must've realised that."

The Doctor sighed. In the aftermath of a regeneration bomb the people it hit would notice the huge differences, their old selves screaming at them to look at the world once again. She'd hoped that little enough time had passed that the hairdryer people would seem _weird_ , so it'd be easier to show people how much danger they could really be in. Things had been worse than she'd thought, clearly— but at least that would give her the chance to test her device.

"John!" said the Doctor through the cubicle door. "There's a Bendolene here; I'm going to need a sock!"

John threw one over the top of the cubicle without responding.

"Because I can see if the stick works," she continued, "by"—

"You do alien things; I trust they'll work. You don't need to tell me about them all."

The Doctor huffed, and explained everything to herself instead. A sock would never be enough for a Bendolene to remember being human. But it might make a human remember how a Bendolene should never be.

She rubbed the sock up and down the stick, generating static electricity. Before long she felt a small zap at her finger, and knew the device was fully operational. She held the stick high, and opened the Bendolene's curtain once again. The awkward man spun round to shout at her once more, but as he did so she snapped the stick hard against her knee—

The shop fell silent, and its faces all fell too. The man in front of the Doctor shifted uncomfortably, looking like a bystander at the scene of an awful accident.

"Something's wrong, isn't it?" he said in a quiet voice. "Everyone knows it, and nobody's saying. It's in the air, maybe. Something's gone very, very wrong."

"It's alright," said the Doctor. "You don't have to be scared by the hairdryer."

The man gave her an odd look. "What hairdryer?" he said.

All around the shop people were looking blankly into the distance, like the most terrifying thing in the world had actually been there all along.

"It's mad, isn't it? All these alien invasions, and we walk around pretending that they never even happened at all!"

"My neighbour's a _squid!_ He's been one for ages and nobody knows what to say!"

"They've made him the _President!_ Why would you want someone like that to ever become the President?"

"I don't understand," said the Bendolene. "I don't understand. I don't understand."

"Can't someone _do_ something?" said the terrified man to the Doctor. "Can't someone stop it?"

The Doctor looked into his eyes, trying not to reflect terror back.

"This isn't"— she took a deep breath. "It's not what I was trying to stop," she said. "I wanted you to let go of an illusion, see what you'd learned not to see. And it's worked, come to that. It's worked just a little bit too well."

"I don't understand," said the Bendolene from under its hat.

"At least that hairdryer person doesn't seem bothered," said the man. "Though you never can tell when it's them! Seems a bit stuck, the poor thing."

The Bendolene's blades started to turn and whizz, as the man freed it from the clothes it was trapped inside.

The Doctor finally snapped like her stick, and let out an anguished scream. She grabbed the Bendolene by its middle and ran across the whole of the shop, shoving it out the door before anyone could say a word.

"Put on those clothes yet, John?" the Doctor cried. "Thinking we might have to get on the way."

"I don't have my socks on!" called a voice from the cubicle.

" _John_ ," said the Doctor tersely, "if all the Earth turns up in the afterlife and I have to tell them it's because you were _busy putting socks on_ "—

" _Okay_ ," said John as he emerged out in a crumpled way. "You're pretty exasperating sometimes; do people ever say?"

"Possibly. We can discuss it as we go. Walk and talk, only faster." She frowned. "Ramble and gambol? We'll workshop it. We need to run, is what I'm saying. We don't have a lot of time anymore. Things are… well. They're a lot worse than I thought."

She looked over at the nearest shopper, who showed no sign of anguish or fear as she inspected a horrible vase. Everything seemed normal for just a moment, although the whole world was about to end. But then that bit was normal too, in a life like hers.

As they both started to run in the direction of the Bendolene, she caught herself wishing she could lose all her memories, too.


	15. Chapter 15

In Manchester a Lord of Time walked into a Cash Converters, and muttered to herself about the smell. Behind her, Chris kept her mutterings to herself, as she carried two filled-up plastic bags that weighed almost as much as her.

"Hello!" said the Doctor happily to the man on the till. "I'm John, this is Chris; don't go around making a fuss about it. We've got a lot of stuff that isn't cash, and so. There's a lot of converting to do."

She spilled the contents of the bags she was holding over the checkout counter, then heaved up the bags her friend had been carrying too. Shoppers and staffers gaped at everything that spilled out; gold and gems and everything else you'd expect to find in a chest of buried treasure.

"Do you even _know_ how much this stuff is worth?" said the man, dumbstruck. "Because it's not very much, he continued, recovering."

"As long as it's enough to hire the best plumber in the city! And the worst. And all of the other ones."

"There's something in the U-bends," said Chris. "You're probably going to die."

"You can have this back, at least," said the man as he lifted something off a lost work by Botticelli, "this sort of tat we'd never sell. What is it, anyway? Some scrap of old Meccano?"

"That should never've been in there," said the Doctor. "It's much too valuable to give away. It's focusing something from a host of possible futures," she said, "and slamming it into the present, right here on Planet Earth."

The man stared at her. He was used to mad, rich ladies telling him impossible things as they sold countless treasures for cash, but they were usually significantly older than this one.

"The Meccano's doing that, is it?" he said, unable to keep the frustration from his voice.

"I think it's what's causing it," said the Doctor. "The way everyone's so angry. A great beam that shouts into everyone's minds, until no one can think straight at all."

The man looked at the woman who was even more stupid than rich, and a fuse box inside him blew out.

"Everyone's not angry because of a beam out of space!" he shouted so that all of the shop turned round, "it's because of people like you! You have so much and I'm sat in this shop here with _nothing_! When I work all day in this weird-smelling place, where the carpets are horrible and there's something not right with the loos."

"There's something in the U-bends," said the Doctor.

" _No there isn't!_ That's my point! You think you're funny, saying these mad things. That people'll laugh, and think about how eccentric you are. But they'll just see you swanning about through a world you don't have to live in, which you're too blonde and stupid to even notice was there!"

"Those are all fair points," said the Doctor. "But I still need you to give me my money. The plumbers—"

"The plumbers would say just the same as me! That it's you who's got a lot of rubbish spilling from your U-bend! When I think about people how people like you can even survive in the world, to be perfectly honest—"


	16. Chapter 16

_"I DON'T UNDERSTAND!"_ bellowed a Bendolene as it came down the street with several more of its kind. A huge number of them were visible in the distance, walking at pace along the street as passers by paid them no attention at all.

John and the Doctor were running as fast as they could with old clothes heaped up in their arms, but somehow they still weren't catching up with the aliens. They all always seemed just that bit too far away, yet another incomprehensible thing about a species that was full of them.

"Everyone's scared," said the Doctor. "I should've seen it! It would've been in what they said, back when I was a psychiatrist, but I'd have been too busy saving the world to notice the world needing to be saved." She scowled. "A psychiatrist'd have a field day. Not me, obviously. I'm having a rubbish one."

"You're a psychiatrist?" said John. "A psychiatric bomb disposal expert? From space?"

"A bit, yeah. Enough that I know now to ask for permission, for what I'm about to say." She wheezed, her alien legs now aching too. "Normally we'd do it sitting down, or something, but I might have a few questions for you. Psychiatrist ones, I'm afraid."

"My Mum's exploded and the planet's just about to. What do you think I'm going to say?"

"That things are terrible, 'cause of course they are. I'm sorry to have to ask anything at all. But it's more of a physical question, when it comes down to it. A brain doctor's good at those too.

She tried to look him in the eyes while she was running, then remembered how that was a very bad idea.

"You know how you sometimes hear ringing?" she said. "How it starts in your ears, and it never goes away? Nothing to worry about, mostly; just your body slowly decaying. But I wondered if it's been happening more _all the time_ these days?"

John looked disbelievingly in her general direction. "Is that really relevant right now?"

"Extremely. Universe depends on it."

John's mind and body groaned.

"Then no," he said through gasping breath. "I've not been hearing anything like that."

"But you've still had, you know, the endless dread?"

"Those have nothing to do with each other!"

"So it would seem," said the Doctor, frowning.

They kept running, then suddenly she gave an enormous gasp. She turned round to John, this time catching him in a bright and enormous grin.

"Unless!" she said. "Do you know about feet?"

John stared at her. "Some things," he said, pushing his irritation into keeping going.

"That's good; it comes in handy. The thing about hearing stuff, it doesn't have to be about your ears. Sound comes up through your body, through your feet, but you still hear it the same as anything else. And maybe the same thing's true of a sound you don't really hear. That you might _feel_ it instead, that everyone might feel"—

"None of that needs a sound," said John. "Anyone can see that things are different now. I mean, it's North Wales; it's always been difficult for us. But things're getting harder, and Mum always lets me know it. What people say, when they know you can't do anything about it. It's all getting worse than before. People say with the physics that I'll definitely have a good future, but it's three years getting a degree. Things keep going the way they're going, who knows what the future'll look like when it's done?"

The Doctor looked at the back of the nearest Bendolene, and wondered how the person it had been had imagined its future might go.

"The future looks like a lot of things right now," she said. "Someone's broken it, and I'm not sure who or why. But I'm the Doctor, and doctors can be pretty good at fixing things. I'll set it right again, and that's a promise. Swear on my name, one John to another."

John found that he believed her, though he wasn't quite sure why.

"The Fell Siren is ringing," she said, "but that doesn't mean we have to give up on the world. Just," she panted, "that we might need something more to hold onto."

She looked on down the road, to a boarded-up shop where the Bendolene were converging.

"Tell me about what you're holding onto," she said. "Tell me about physics."

John huffed and wheezed, too exhausted to work out why he trusted her. "I say it's to get a job, but it isn't really. A few years ago I read a book about quantum stuff, and it blew my mind. It's impossible for anyone to really understand, but it's how the universe really works, right?"

"Sort of," said the Doctor. "A bit."

"It was a difficult time for me, with my parents splitting up. I'd never fitted in anyway, but after that I was totally lost. Like everyone else fitted into something that I didn't slot into at all. And at that point… I needed to know there was more than just people, I think. That it was bigger than that; things were bigger than this. It mattered less if I didn't fit in if nobody really did, you know? If we're just a small bit of the universe. I needed that to go on, back then. It kind of all went from there."

The Doctor laughed to herself, very quietly.

John glowered at her. "You think that's _funny?_ "

She shook her head. "Not at all. It's just however much I'm trying, I still forget sometimes."

"What?"

She smiled. "That I'm not the only John Smith. Which is good," she said. "'Cause we're going to need as many as we can get."

She nodded to the closed up shop where they'd arrived, where dozens of Bendolene were breaking through chipboard and glass with the blades at the ends of the mouths. "I don't understand," they were chorusing, over and over again, and someone who didn't know much about them might think it a bit like a battle cry.

"A run down shop in a town like this," said John. "It's an odd sort of place for the end of the world."

"Maybe," said the Doctor, "or perhaps it's like you were saying. The world works in ways you can't understand, in ways that you can't even know. And perhaps that even means a place like that" – she waggled her screwdriver at the corpse of the shop – "could be the most important thing on the planet."

She looked into his eyes.

"Are you frightened?" she said.

John looked at the tatty street, still wet from the recent rain. It had regenerated from an alien bomb, there were aliens crowding on it on one side. And somehow it was hard to believe that anything could happen there at all.

"No," he said. "I should be. But I'm not."

"Okay," said the Doctor. "Then we'll have to do something about that."

She smiled maniacally for a fraction of a second, then threw all the clothes in her arms right at John. Before he could react she was running towards the cracked apart shop window, pushing the Bendolene aside as she threw herself through the board and glass. There was a huge _smash_ as chipboard and shards went everywhere, then from the inside of the shop John heard a tiny groan.

"Shouldn't have done that," said the Doctor's soft voice sounding small. " _Really_ not the best of my awful plans."

It all hit him, then: that the whole world was actually in danger and the only person who could save it was reckless and peppered with glass. Except there was another person who had to save it and it was _him_ , who hadn't even been the son who his parents had wanted. He suddenly thought about Turkmenistan; how he didn't even know where it was and how everyone there could be dead in the hour because of him. He'd never wanted responsibility, but at that moment he was the most important human alive.

She'd _known_ he would think this, he realised. Somehow she could put together that jumping through a window would jolt him to being scared, and she'd done it while looking like she didn't know what she was doing at all. Did she know _more_ , then? Did she know he was thinking this?

"I can be that manipulative, yes," said the Doctor from inside. "But I'm also still very much in pain."

"I don't understand," said a Bendolene through globs of chipboard, "I don't understand."

"Must be nice," said John. "I understand fine. I know I'm going to jump through all that glass"– he sighed –"and it doesn't much help with the fear."

He squared himself up in an awkward way, then threw himself through the window too.


	17. Chapter 17

John's mother was feeling very alone as evening fell over the room. Rosie hadn't come round like she said she would, and she hoped they hadn't fallen out in some way. Sometimes their relationship could be strained, what with her being a hairdryer and not understanding anything she said, but she was still grateful for the company. It wasn't about the conversation, in the end: it was just the being with someone, whoever they happened to be.

She looked again at the clock ticking out the long day. She had no idea where John had gone – sports, perhaps, at least one of the many he played – but she'd have expected him to be home by now. It hadn't been a stressful day, but there were the old frustrations of her life to attend to: the same grief and hurt as there always was. John would listen and nod as he always did, because he was an attentive son. It wasn't like him to be elsewhere, when she needed him as badly as this.

She thought again about the boy who'd broken in. He'd been deeply disturbed, but he'd known who John was. Had he met him, or even done something to her son? Even the possibility made her shudder. She told John all the time how hard it had been losing one of the men in her life. Her greatest fear had always been that one day she'd be without the other.

She rang John's mobile yet another time, and just like before it wasn't even dead. There was only a voice saying his number didn't exist, that it never had. It was getting harder to believe that someone had made a mistake.

Her anxious pacing was getting too desperate to keep within one room. She started to walk through corridors and past the enormous vase, then noticed the door to one room at an odd angle— like it had been opened with force. Her heart raced as she went through, then fell to the floor as she saw the devastation within.

There'd been no sound at all. How could that be, for a struggle as violent as the one that had happened here? Had her John been here, as the other one wrestled him to the ground? Had he been too afraid to scream?

Hands shaking, she dialled the number for the police.


	18. Chapter 18

"I know it doesn't make any sense!" the Doctor said again, over the howls of the Bendolene blaring that they agreed.

"No, I get it. They'll turn this shop into a giant spaceship, but neither of us can know how that would be. And they wouldn't know about… brushing your teeth, or what your teeth even were. Because they're different. You don't need to say that again."

"Of course. Sorry. I get a bit used to explaining things," she sighed, "like I'm the only John Smith in the room."

"It's just a name," said John to the mess of the room. It was already a ruin, but the Bendolene were doing their best to ruin it more. They were battering the plaster of the walls with the stumps where their hands could have been, then bashing their heads against the floorboards as they cried.

Whatever they were doing, it seemed to be working. Somehow the room was bigger than it had been before, while remaining exactly the same size. The seconds were going solid and the walls were becoming time; the dust on the floor was stretching into a vastness. Reality was straining like a popcorn kernel, about to explode to a ship the size of a sun.

"Hold them back!" The Doctor shouted as she grabbed John's pile of clothes. "I need to get to the centre, but I won't be able to fight!" She waggled the heap of trousers and tops to indicate her hands were full.

"I don't know how!" John shouted as the Doctor began to run. "I'm not that violent!"

"Neither am I!" said the Doctor. "That's why people like us have to get creative!"

"I don't understand," said the nearest Bendolene to John, which seemed very close even with space and time going wrong.

"I'm sorry about this," said John as he raised his fist. "I really am." He bought it crashing into the side of the alien's head, to its hard plastic shell that was somehow even harder than it looked. He swore as his hand bent inwards with pain, then shoved the Bendolene so it smashed into the floor.

"I can't hold them back for long," he said. "There's just one of me, and a lot of them."

"I'll only take a moment!" shouted the Doctor. "However long that lasts in a place like this." The room had shifted so much that she seemed at the end of a hall of mirrors, her shape distorting as the space around her deformed. But she'd arrived at whatever passed for the centre of the room, and spun round to face John as she threw the pile of clothes to the ground. She crouched down along with them and rubbed the stick as frantically as she could, and before long electric lightning was crackling through the space.

"Bendolene!" shouted the Doctor at the top of her voice. "Speak to the people you once were! Think the thoughts you don't think now, feel the fear you can't even comprehend! When you were softer than plastic, had noses instead of blades. Remember the people you've been, and how they would not want this world to end. Remember being human!" she cried, "and spare the whole human race."

For a second all the Bendolene stopped, the propellers in their mouths freezing as their heads turned towards the Doctor. The space stopped expanding and the warping walls went still: everything was silent as the aliens stared at a woman not alien enough.

"I don't understand," one said from far away.

"I don't understand," said another that was horribly near.

One by one the Bendolene cried it, over and over again. " _I DON'T UNDERSTAND!_ " they bawled. " _I DON'T UNDERSTAND! I DON'T UNDERSTAND!_ "

John looked hopelessly into the distance, trying not to glance at the Doctor's face. It seemed wrong to think that she could be defeated, even if there were only moments before he'd never think anything again. But a part of his mind forced him to look over towards her regardless—

—and she was looking right at him to shout one last, desperate thing—

"Do you like people?" she said, her voice entirely sincere.

John had thought he was too terrified to get annoyed at the Doctor again, but she always found a way to prove him wrong.

"Is this the time for that?" he asked as he rammed a Bendolene as hard as he could, causing it to fall sideways through gravity that had gone wrong.

"Trust me!" she yelled. "I know it's hard. But do."

"Everyone's about to die!" he shouted. "Thinking about what that means just makes things worse."

"It would! Because you _do_ like people, don't you? No matter how isolated you felt, that's the one thing that never changed. You can't stop caring however different you feel, and I know that 'cause I know how I'm just the same."

John finally lost his patience.

"It doesn't _matter!_ " he said. "Don't you see how that doesn't matter at all? They'll all be dead soon; splattered into bits! We've seconds to live and your talking's just making them _WORSE!_ "

The Doctor had a look that was supposed to make everything better, and it made John angrier than he'd ever been before.

"You're not alien at all!" he shouted. "You're just like everyone else, saying you know what I'm going through! Like you could, when my family's broken and the world's a mess and everyone's suddenly _aliens_ "—

"I don't understand," said the Bendolene all as one. "I don't understand. I don't"—

 _"I DON'T UNDERSTAND EITHER!"_ he shouted into the nearest's ridiculous face. "Everything's _gone_. I'm lonely and tired, I've no idea what's happening; my family's happy and I'm never going to see them again."

"I needed the world to be strange!" he cried. "But I didn't need it to be _you_. It wasn't a threat before you came. I didn't want everyone to die."

He swallowed, and let himself be selfish.

"I didn't want _me_ to die," he added quietly.

The Bendolene looked at him with its grilles that passed for eyes.

"I don't understand," it said impassively.

John slumped to the ground with a sob, trying not to cry, trying so hard as not to notice the fact the advancing figures had stopped, and that the Doctor's face had broken into a grin…

" ...you don't understand," continued the hairdryer thoughtfully.

John stared, barely noticing the Doctor's guffaw.

"I don't understand. You don't understand. I don't understand. You don't understand!" chorused the aliens.

John looked at the Doctor and started laughing. "You set me up, didn't you?" he said in a gleeful way. "You knew I'd react like that." He shook his head. "You manipulative _bas_ "—

"Careful," said the Doctor. "Some of the hairdryers might've been children. And we're in touch with their past selves, now. Not much, mind, not enough to get much through. But there's one thing you do have in common, no matter how dissimilar you are."

"They're scared," he said.

"Not quite. But they're something a little bit like it. Enough to empathise with a person that's nothing like them. Just the right amount to acknowledge what matters to you."

As she was speaking the dimensions were resetting themselves, going back to the ones they were before. But the shape of what was appearing was different; the floorboards transformed into control panels and plaster turned into great engines. You could still tell, just about, that it has once been a worn-out old shop. But it had changed enough that it was now a spaceship as well.

"We should leave," said the Doctor. "We won't understand what it's cost them, to keep their ship this size. Let them mourn, or whatever they do that's most like it. But they deserve to be alone with their thoughts."

John nodded. He wasn't sure he was empathising with them properly, when he tried to imagine how they might feel. But then that was true for everyone, when they thought about anyone at all.

"Where are they going?" he said. "Where are they going to live?"

"I don't know," said the Doctor. "And this time I can't ask, either."

John nodded to himself, very slightly.

"Doctor," he said.

"Yes?"

"Where am _I_ going to live?"

"Now that question," she said, "is one I definitely _can_ ask. It's just," she sighed, "that I've been trying really hard not to."

John caught her unsure glance, and bit his lip.

It turned out it felt pretty rubbish, when you saved the world.


	19. Chapter 19

"I thought it would feel good, saving things," said Chris as she licked her large ice cream. "But when we do it I sometimes feel embarrassed."

"You shouldn't go doing that!" said the Doctor. She gestured to the grassy park before them, where every plumber in the city sat happily eating food. "They saved Manchester as much as you, and they don't look embarrassed, do they?"

"That one does," said Chris, pointing.

" _Chris!_ That's just his face. "Why would you feel bad, anyway? Saving a city is a good thing! You wouldn't feel guilty doing the dishes, and there wouldn't be dishes if they'd all been crunched up by a snake."

"It's just very big. Like if someone at school did well in a test and told me, I'd bad as my thing was so much bigger."

A plumber who didn't look even a bit embarrassed bounced over to the Doctor and grinned.

"I just wanted to say," he said to them both, "that was _incredible_. You were incredible! It's not just the double pay." He shook his head. "A snake in a toilet's an urban legend, but a snake in every toilet? Nobody'd ever believe it!"

"They wouldn't," said the Doctor. "Which is convenient, in these circumstances."

"I didn't enjoy that," said Chris when the plumber had gone away. "I don't like being thanked for things."

"No," said the Doctor, taking a big bite out of her own ice cream, then frowning as she remembered she'd ordered the cheese flavoured one. "Sometimes I don't, either. I think I'm a version of me who hates it, right now. It's hard enough saving the world, without feeling uncomfortable when you're done."

"You get it," said Chris, eating her sensibly flavoured ice cream.

"Sometimes I want to be a plumber," she said. "You can help people then, and nobody really cares about it."

"I could hire you once you are," said the Doctor. "There's so many loos in the TARDIS, and I don't know where any of them go. I always worry it ends up somewhere in the universe, and by now the people who live there'll all be very annoyed."

"I feel bad for the fish," said Chris, "when I think where the toilets go."

She was quiet for a while.

"Do you feel bad having fun?" she said. "Saving the world, or being a psychiatrist. You don't want to be an adult, but they're very adult things."

"And adults can be bad at them. Maybe they're not having enough fun. You don't have to be grim to be responsible, probably, though I've tried very hard never to be either. But it's got to the point that I've needed to pick one," she said, "and I've always known which of them's better."

From the pocket of her jeans, her pager booped and bleeped. She looked at it briefly, and sighed.

"Case in point", she said. "Duty calls again, I'm afraid. They've found a time bomb."

"That doesn't sound like it needs you to stop it."

"A bomb built out of time. Something my people made, to show they were smart enough to be that stupid. If I don't defuse it, a whole lot of people'll become different people, and they won't get any say in it at all. But"—

"It's not something a child should be involved in," said Chris with a heavy sigh.

"I'm sorry. But at least you won't have to feel bad about this. I'll take you home on the tram; no sense using a time machine again. You can have hoops for your tea; I can go off and save North Wales."

The first of those did sound better, Chris thought.

"My mum's glad she met you," said Chris. "She wouldn't ever say it. But she is."

"I know," said the Doctor. "I'm glad I met you both too."

For a moment between saving people and saving some others again, the Doctor let herself feel the sun on her skin. It could be exhausting, being on duty. But that made it all the more important to notice the times you were happy.


	20. Chapter 20

"They're looking for him," said John. "The me who isn't _me_. It's on the radio; it'll be in the local news. Maybe the national too, if I'm photogenic enough."

"They'll have a hard time finding him," said the Doctor. "seeing as he doesn't exist."

"No," said John. "He doesn't. But"—

He looked down at his hand, and made it glow gentle and orange.

"He could," he said.

The Doctor looked at him like he'd told her he had a rare disease.

"You never mentioned that," she said.

"No," he said. "I didn't want you to say… the thing that I knew you would."

Whatever that was, the Doctor didn't say it now. She just looked quietly at him, waiting for him to continue.

"It's silly, being afraid of it," he said. "It's not like I'd be going to my death. I'd have a new life, where people liked me more. I'd probably be happier, even! The other John seemed more at ease with his lot. Parenting for his parents, and never getting angry. I'd be a better person than I am now."

His hand was glowing in an almost playful way, like a fire before it went out of control.

"They do still have lives, the people in this town," said the Doctor without emotion. "They're still people, even the people that they were. When a regeneration bomb hits you, it's not the end of your life. But there's a reason so many people'd think there'd be nothing that's left of you at all."

John shrugged. "If I wouldn't have the memories of what I am… then it's not like I'd miss it, would I?"

"In a way. But you'd also not have them, as well. You like yourself, don't you? Everyone says you shouldn't, but you do. And everyone likes that other you, or you think they do in your mind. So you think that makes it wrong," she said, "that you know you'd like staying yourself more."

"You would've sacrificed yourself, back there. Wouldn't you? If it turned out you had to. You would've lost more than I will, and you'd have done it without a thought."

"Yes. And sometimes I wish, more than anything… that there was someone who'd tell me to stop."

John looked sadly down at his hands.

"My Mum couldn't take it," he said. "Not when both her lads were gone."

"Perhaps. But you definitely couldn't take _being_ gone. Because you wouldn't be there," she frowned, "and that's logic."

"It's incredibly selfish," he said.

"Maybe," she said. "And I've seen what selfishness can do. When it's done by the strongest of us and the weakest, when it's tiny and when it's huge."

John sighed heavily at the weight of her Doctor's words.

"And that's why I know," she went on, "when it's okay to be selfish anyway. To refuse, I suppose. To say that you won't be consumed. And if you were me, then you'd change without even thinking. But the one thing I know about _being_ me… it's that no one else should ever have to experience it."

"You're John Smith," she said, "but that's not the same thing as being the Doctor. Please, whatever you become— you don't want to go down that road."

"That's… that's not what I thought you'd say at all."

"And it's not what I should've said! I forgot the most important thing of all."

She flashed a sad smile at him.

"That it has to be your choice."

He looked past her police box to the phone box where they'd first met, and at the world beyond it that had completely changed. And he thought about his new mother who was still the same, about caring for her forever and never caring about that at all. What she'd do and what she'd already done, the woman she wasn't and the woman she still was. Something inside him was saying that he could just _let go_ —

He had no desire to see time and space. But he wanted, very much, to still see the world as him.

"Doctor," he said eventually, "can your police box look like a living thing?"

She shook her head. "Not my one. No mod cons."

He looked at his feet and swallowed.

"How about a dead one?" he said.


	21. Chapter 21

No one knew who'd scheduled the woman who was about to speak, or even what she was called. John had many friends and the funeral arrangements had been complicated; everyone assumed someone else knew her face very well.

They'd found the body; she'd seen to that. Someone who wouldn't be scarred by the discovery; something that was fatal but didn't leave a mark. Nothing suspicious or that could suggest a suicide. Just a tragic accident that had taken someone brilliant away. It could be very easy to do something incredibly awful. But you ever did it, you should stand in front of the people who it would change.

The Doctor stood before the coffin and cleared her throat. She was wearing huge glasses which broadcast to the TARDIS scanner, through which John was watching his own funeral taking place. The scanner was in a spaceship disguised as his own dead body, and that body didn't look like the one he was wearing now. He was trying very hard not to think about the whole situation, but it wasn't going very well at all.

"I didn't know John for very long," the Doctor was saying to the mourners. "And the John I knew wasn't much like the one you did. But like you, I know he was a good person; an inspiring one. Exceptional enough to deserve a particular speech."

The mourners looked up at her, grateful she was there.

"I know what you're supposed to say at a funeral," she went on. "That when someone goes, they're not really gone. John's always still there in the memories of the people who loved him, and this church is full of you today. As long as even one of you lives, it means John's living on inside you. You could say that he's not really dead at all."

She took a deep breath.

"But that's not true at all, is it?" she said.

The mourners' eyes went hard instead of moist.

"A memory's _nothing_ , after all," she continued. "It's a tiny bit of a person, even if you knew them well. John would've thought things – experienced things – that none of you would have known, and those are gone forever now."

The atmosphere had turned to ice, but the Doctor didn't seem to have noticed. Her face was beaming as the people stared on in horror, like she was a fire cremating their mornings to ash.

"But it wouldn't even matter if you did know everything," she said. "All of what John thought and what he did. Knowing a person's not the same as being them, and it's almost _insulting_ to pretend that isn't true. Everyone's a world with themselves stuck right in at the centre, and John's whole world is gone forever now."

"I don't like to interrupt these services," said the reverend, "but this is a _highly_ inappropriate speech for a funeral—"

"It's the _most_ appropriate speech! Because you'll all be here one day, won't you? If you're lucky, and there's still a planet left after you're gone. And _you're_ not memories, are you? You're _you!_ You'd want people to know that, I think. That you were a whole person, and everyone is. Or else we're all just the things we do for each other, we forget how we're _people_ at all. And you shouldn't do that to someone like John, who you cared for as much as you did."

There was a person inside John's body, and he was watching the discomfort in the room. This wasn't something the Doctor should be doing, John thought. She was saying it because she needed to hear it, and she'd become convinced that others might need to as well. There was so much responsibility in her life that she'd done something wildly irresponsible, that would be hurtful and traumatic but which she'd gone on and done all the same. She would never have made the comparison with the choice that he had made. But he couldn't get away from it, however hard he tried.

"Where we might be going," the Doctor was saying, "we have to be more than memories. We need to know what we all really are; what all of us can lose. Empathy's hard because it requires pain, but running away from it means we all run away from each other. We need to know John was more than we knew he was."

She looked up at them all.

"And we need to know what it really means to die."

The mourners all stared horrified at the stage. After a very uncomfortable silence had passed, an old woman near the front caught the reverend's eye.

"I've been to a lot of these," she said, "and I've never known if we can boo."

"Do you know," said the reverend, "before today I'd have said that you couldn't."

The old woman started to jeer, and mourner after mourner followed suit. The Doctor smiled awkwardly as the boos and heckles filled the room.

"Perhaps I should have picked a better moment," she said. "But still. It's something to think about, isn't it?"

Someone tried to throw something, then someone else did as well. That was very inappropriate for a funeral, the Doctor thought. She got off the stage before something could actually hit her, and as she did so she heard an awful wail.

John's mother was crying in total despair, so loudly and wretchedly that the Doctor suspected she'd not even been listening to the speech. That was possibly a good thing, now she thought about it. But perhaps that woman's pain was already as great as it could be.

Sometimes it took a while, before people changed. But in the universe this Doctor had ended up in, she'd found that she was changing a lot. She'd seen a lot of pain, since she'd qualified as a psychiatrist. But she still wasn't used to the world as it seemed to be now.

None of this would have happened to the proper Doctor, she thought. She'd have found a way to keep everyone happy; not to leave a broken mother here alone. The wrongness of it all was ringing in her ears, but endings got more complicated when the Fell Siren began to sound.

John's mother burst out with a new and aching sob.

Maybe there were limits to how bad an ending could be.


	22. Chapter 22

The TARDIS was materialising late at night, so the Doctor was doing it away from all the houses. It wheezed into being on disused land out of town, between bracken and sedge grass where only nocturnal things lived. It wouldn't have occurred to her to do this before, to make sure she wouldn't wake things with her machine. She had to do annoying things a _bit_ , surely? She wouldn't be the Doctor if she stopped.

As she stepped out to the freezing air her pager beeped again, and she gave a groan that would have woken up anything that had still been asleep. She almost didn't look at it then decided she had to anyway, but there was just a formal message telling her the shift was over. Someone else would be on duty now, someone better at it. She wouldn't have to do it again for several thousands of years.

She walked to their house through the cold and the rain, in clothes that weren't good for the weather. Sometimes Lorna would stay awake long after she pretended to sleep, but that night everything was quiet as the Doctor let herself in. It was for the best, in a way, that they didn't see. In the morning she'd show them what she'd bought them and say it was a present and not an apology, and if they'd all slept for long enough they'd be able to pretend that was true.

Sometimes legends of the Doctor would ask if she really slept, but the people who'd written them hadn't seen the way she'd looked that night. She collapsed on the sofa in all of her ordinary clothes, and all the monsters in the world could never have got her to wake.

In her dreams she thought of another world, where everything she could do to save anyone might only make everything worse, and just before she woke up she wasn't sure it was another world at all…

...She'd never thought her nightmares would ever become like a human's.


	23. Chapter 23

John looked at the Doctor as she leaned against the stained blue wood. It was bizarre, really, how strong she could manage to be. For a moment she seemed tiny and her TARDIS a smashed up old wreck, but even then that sense of her power remained. Perhaps a Bendolene could describe it, how looking at her made him feel. But he wasn't sure that a human being ever could, or understand the words that would make it clear.

"I'll never be able to forgive myself," he said again.

"Maybe not," said the Doctor. "But at least you'll remember why. And what's a lot more important," she said, "is that at least you've not stopped being you."

John frowned. "I don't think anyone's ever said things like to me. That I should put myself first, even sometimes. That the things that I am are all fine."

"Well, it's a good job you met me, then," said the Doctor. "Most people're fine, next to some of the ones who I've seen."

"I don't think I'll ever believe that," said John. "Not when it's me who I'm thinking of. But you're right, I suppose. It'll still be myself who feels guilty."

John fell silent for a while, observing the chill of the wind.

"Can I tell you something about physics?" he said, feeling stupid as he did.

"You can tell me whatever you like," said the Doctor, shrugging. "I've heard a whole lot from these human brains."

"It's about brains, in a way. I told you back when we were running, how quantum physics made me feel. Like there was a world beyond us humans, that we'd never understand it at all. But now that I've met the Bendolene? It feels a lot less reassuring."

He paused, breathing out into the wind.

"You're not human, of course," he said. "And I don't understand you at all. But it makes me feel like the best of the books did, I think. Somehow it's different, when it's you."

She smiled at him. " _John_ ," she said. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were hitting on me."

He blushed very brightly. "Not that!" he said. "You must be in your _thirties!_ "

She smiled. "It's a joke, just," she said. "I'm having a little joke. Have to have jokes, don't we, with the Fell Siren going on?"

She glanced up at her paint encrusted time machine.

"Come with me," she said. "I have so many adventures. I should warn you; sometimes there' sometimes a child along, but I've got a big list of swear words so you'll know what you've not to say. She might find it, of course," she said with a frown. "I won't know what to do then."

"It's an amazing offer," he said. "And I shouldn't be turning it down. "But it's too much, I think, after losing my mum and dad. Maybe even otherwise, to tell you the truth. I've never enjoyed going travelling."

"That's the thing! Nobody seems to anymore. Once people thought it'd be the best, to go backpacking all round the universe. But now?" she shook her head. "It's like there's something else on your minds."

She fished something out of the pocket of her jeans.

"This is my card," she said. "If something's not right, if there's anything you ever need. Just go to that house, and tell them the Doctor sent you." She wagged a finger as a thought occurred to her. "They _might_ not react very well, if it turns out I'm still on duty. But they should perk up a bit once they realise you're not another me."

John took the card, and snorted at the address. " _Manchester?_ That's quite some way away."

She thumped on the TARDIS door. "It's a lot closer than this'll probably be. There's a little button on the back of the card. Tap it, and I'll come as soon as I can."

She half-smiled, and held out her hand. "John Smith."

He grinned, taking it. "Likewise."

"Firm handshake," she said. "I think I once thought that mattered. I've had so many lives by now; I must've had all the opinions. But I hope that whoever I was— that we'd always have ended up friends."

She looked at him. "Goodbye, John."

"Goodbye, Doctor."

The door closed with a thud, its flaked paint blowing in the wind. John stood there until the box had completely dissolved away, forcing himself to believe it was the most normal thing in the world.

Everything was different, and it all was exactly the same.

For the first time, he understood what it really meant to change.


	24. Chapter 24

John looked at the Doctor as she leaned against the stained blue wood. It was bizarre, really, how strong she could manage to be. For a moment she seemed tiny and her TARDIS a smashed up old wreck, but even then that sense of her power remained. Perhaps a Bendolene could describe it, how looking at her made him feel. But he wasn't sure that a human being ever could, or understand the words that would make it clear.

"I'll never be able to forgive myself," he said again.

"Maybe not," said the Doctor. "But at least you'll remember why. And what's a lot more important," she said, "is that at least you've not stopped being you."

John frowned. "I don't think anyone's ever said things like to me. That I should put myself first, even sometimes. That the things that I am are all fine."

"Well, it's a good job you met me, then," said the Doctor. "Most people're fine, next to some of the ones who I've seen."

"I don't think I'll ever believe that," said John. "Not when it's me who I'm thinking of. But you're right, I suppose. It'll still be myself who feels guilty."

John fell silent for a while, observing the chill of the wind.

"Can I tell you something about physics?" he said, feeling stupid as he did.

"You can tell me whatever you like," said the Doctor, shrugging. "I've heard a whole lot from these human brains."

"It's about brains, in a way. I told you back when we were running, how quantum physics made me feel. Like there was a world beyond us humans, that we'd never understand it at all. But now that I've met the Bendolene? It feels a lot less reassuring."

He paused, breathing out into the wind.

"You're not human, of course," he said. "And I don't understand you at all. But it makes me feel like the best of the books did, I think. Somehow it's different, when it's you."

She smiled at him. " _John_ ," she said. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were hitting on me."

He blushed very brightly. "Not that!" he said. "You must be in your _thirties!_ "

She smiled. "It's a joke, just," she said. "I'm having a little joke. Have to have jokes, don't we, with the Fell Siren going on?"

She glanced up at her paint encrusted time machine.

"Come with me," she said. "I have so many adventures. I should warn you; sometimes there' sometimes a child along, but I've got a big list of swear words so you'll know what you've not to say. She might find it, of course," she said with a frown. "I won't know what to do then."

"It's an amazing offer," he said. "And I shouldn't be turning it down. "But it's too much, I think, after losing my mum and dad. Maybe even otherwise, to tell you the truth. I've never enjoyed going travelling."

"That's the thing! Nobody seems to anymore. Once people thought it'd be the best, to go backpacking all round the universe. But now?" she shook her head. "It's like there's something else on your minds."

She fished something out of the pocket of her jeans.

"This is my card," she said. "If something's not right, if there's anything you ever need. Just go to that house, and tell them the Doctor sent you." She wagged a finger as a thought occurred to her. "They _might_ not react very well, if it turns out I'm still on duty. But they should perk up a bit once they realise you're not another me."

John took the card, and snorted at the address. " _Manchester?_ That's quite some way away."

She thumped on the TARDIS door. "It's a lot closer than this'll probably be. There's a little button on the back of the card. Tap it, and I'll come as soon as I can."

She half-smiled, and held out her hand. "John Smith."

He grinned, taking it. "Likewise."

"Firm handshake," she said. "I think I once thought that mattered. I've had so many lives by now; I must've had all the opinions. But I hope that whoever I was— that we'd always have ended up friends."

She looked at him. "Goodbye, John."

"Goodbye, Doctor."

The door closed with a thud, its flaked paint blowing in the wind. John stood there until the box had completely dissolved away, forcing himself to believe it was the most normal thing in the world.

Everything was different, and it all was exactly the same.

For the first time, he understood what it really meant to change.


End file.
